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There are three extant lists of tale titles which purport to enumerate a series of medieval remscéla ‘prefatory tales’ to the Táin Bó Cúailnge: 1. in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster (LL); 2. in the fifteenth-century RIA MS D iv.2 (D); and 3. in the seventeenth-century RIA MS C vi.3 (C), which is a conflation of the LL and D lists. Due to the nature of the lists and the finite amount of linguistic diagnostics, it is not possible to date the remscéla lists with any certainty. However, the LL manuscript itself provides a Middle Irish terminus post quem for the LL list and gives the impression that the remscéla were understood to be part of a series at the time of transmission of Recension II of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC). If this is so, why were the tales not compiled as a series in the manuscript, such as we find in the sixteenth-century Brit. Libr. MS Egerton 1782? Similarly, there is no attempt by the Recension II redactor to create further textual conhesion with the remscéla by inserting allusory remarks.In this paper, I will discuss the likelihood that the remscéla series was coined by the medieval scholar long after the emergence of the tales themselves. Despite this hypothesis, however, the series is rife with textual links among the remscéla and between the remscéla and the Táin Bó Cúailnge: textual links range from overt, one-line references to the Táin, e.g. the final line in Aislinge Óenguso, to fully developed, narrative episodes, e.g. Táin Bó Regamna. I will identify the nature of these textual links and their impact on the creation of the remscéla as a literary series.

2.

Cleary, Christina

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Languages, Department of English, Celtic Section. Department of Irish and Celtic Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

In honour of Eleanor Knott’s work on the Early Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (TBDD), ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, this paper will investigate the group of remscéla, ‘prefatory tales’, associated with TBDD and the wider implications of medieval, literary serialization. The attested use of the term remscél appears sparingly throughout medieval Irish literature: apart from TBDD, the only other extant examples of the term refer to those tales associated with the Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC) and to the various episodes in the Irish adaptation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, In Cath Catharda ‘The War of the Romans’.During this talk, I will draw comparisons between TBDD and TBC in particular and how the two extended narratives were prime candidates for literary serialisation. I will also investigate the differences in the nature of the textual relationship between the remscéla of TBC and TBDD; and, furthermore, how this impacts the definition of the term remscél. Taking stock of Erich Poppe’s study into the diachronic development of ‘cyclical impulse’ (Poppe 2008, 42), I will also comment on the manipulation of pre-existing tales for the purpose of complementing a literary series and if/how this manifests itself in the categorization of the TBDD remscéla.

Poppe, E., 2008: Of Cycles and Other Critical Matters. Some Issues in Medieval Irish Literary History and Criticism, E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lectures 9. University of Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

3.

Cleary, Christina

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Languages, Department of English, Celtic Section. Department of Irish and Celtic Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

This paper presents some of my findings from a structural study of the remscéla ‘prefatory tales’ to the Táin Bó Cúailnge in Eg. 1782 (Eg.); it outlines the application and adaptation of Proppian methodology in the search of an overarching principle governing the use of the classificatory term remscél. Moving away from the traditional taxonomy, Propp’s framework provides a fitting empirical schema for the study of the Remscéla Tána Bó Cúailnge, as it looks beneath the descriptive details of the superficial narrative stratum. I endeavour to show that, through the application of the Proppian model, we can unearth the minimal narrative components (i.e. the narrative ‘functions’) of the series of these twelve tales. Once revealed, the narrative ‘functions’ of the remscéla corpus in Eg. provide us with a better understanding of their textual reception and the compiler’s intentions. I hope to show that, although the remscéla list was a secondary invention to the composition of the individual tales, their collocation and form in the Eg. compilation reflects a conscious attempt at creating a narrative whole.

4.

Cleary, Christina

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Languages, Department of English, Celtic Section. Department of Irish and Celtic Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

What more efficient method of promulgating one’s supremacy over a people than to exert sexual dominance over their wives and daughters? Known variously as droit du seigneur, droit de cuissage, ius primae noctis on the Continent, and coll cétingen in Early Irish literature, the archetypal right of a lord or king to deflower his female subjects was not an uncommon literary concept throughout the course of history. While scholars as diverse as Gary Beckman and Alain Boureau have advanced the studies of such customs in Anatolia and medieval France respectively, little has been achieved in the field of Celtic Studies. This paper questions whether the custom formally existed within Irish society and, furthermore, whether it was implemented using tribal law or simply societal tradition.

I also discuss pre-marital virginity in medieval Irish society and its impact on economic matters such as bride-price; this brings into focus whether ius primae noctis is a plausible practice in a society preoccupied with women’s chastity and continence. Both the fictional, medieval Irish material and the laws allude to the value (either monetary or otherwise) of the greatest female commodity, virginity, and such is the case that being stripped thereof appears to have inflated the jurisdiction of the king.

Scéla Conchobair meic Nessa (‘The Tidings of Conchobar mac Nessa’), Tochmarc Emire (‘The Wooing of Emer’), Talland Étair (‘The Siege of Howth’) and Echtrae Nerai (‘The Adventure of Nera’) all exhibit literary examples of how a king or lord may intrude upon the intimate relationships of his subjects, and therefore enforce his own authority. Obviously, the dichotomy between royal exemplar as represented in the literature and social reality is complicated. Yet, what is fictional literature but a mirrored embodiment of social norms?

The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’)and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed.

The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents.

The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive.

The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.

This dissertation contains a critical edition of the early Irish tale Aided Derbforgaill “the violent death of Derbforgaill”. It includes an introduction discussing the main thematic components of the tale as well as intertextuality, transmission and manuscript relationship. The edition is accompanied by transcripts from the three manuscript copies of the tale and textual notes.

Aided Derbforgaill is an Ulster Cycle tale and belongs to a category of tales describing the death of prominent heroes, rarely heroines, in early Irish literature. Arriving in the shape of a bird to mate with the greatest of all heroes, Cú Chulainn, Derbforgaill is refused by Cú Chulainn on account of him having sucked her blood. Forced to enter a urination competition between women, and upon winning this, Derbforgaill is mutilated by the other competitors. The tale ends with two poems lamenting the death of Derbforgaill. This very short tale is complex, not only in its subject matter, but in the elliptical language of the poetry. Thematically the tale is a combination of very common motifs found elsewhere in early Irish literature, such as the Otherworld, metamorphosis and the love of someone unseen, and some rare motifs that are almost unique to this tale, such as blood sucking and the urination competition. The text also have clear sexual overtones.

This collection of essays in Irish offers the reader particular insights into the concept of tradition in its widest sense as well as into the manner in which tradition is appropriated and refashioned. Published under the title ‘Sealbhú an Traidisiúin’, it consists of papers first presented at a one-day international conference hosted in University College Dublin in May 2011.

It is well known that Irish English, like some traditional British English dialects, uses specific forms to denote habitual action in the present. In the north of the country the marker in question tends to be inflected be, whereas do + be is used in southern dialects (compare Filppula 1999 and Fiess 2003). While habitual marking by do has extended from the British Isles to various parts of the English-speaking world, habitual be is rarer (cf. Kortmann 2004). In addition to Ireland, it is used in Newfoundland (cf. Clark 2004) as well as in varieties of African American Vernacular English, South Eastern American Vernaculars, Gullah, Chicago English and Bahamian English (cf. e.g. Kortmann et al. (ed.) 2004). Recently, Hickey (2006) has asserted that the mechanisms at work in the genesis of this phenomenon in Irish English are still ill-understood, and he also points to the lack of the phenomenon in Scottish varieties of English. This paper proposes to re-examine evidence from the dialects of the ‘Inner Colonies’ in question from a language contact point of view. The guiding research question is whether differences in the Gaelic and British contact languages may play a role in the further development of their contact varieties.

The paper investigates periphrastic progressives, perfects and futures in the Irish language. The guiding research question was how periphrastic tense and aspect constructions grammaticalised in the Irish language, and secondly, whether the same development can be found in a closely related language, Welsh. The approach employed in the paper is largely empirical. The data has been manually extracted from written corpora of Old- and Middle Irish texts, consisting of about 120,000 and 130,000 words respectively, as well as from a Middle Welsh sample corpus consisting of about 42,000 words. The material is discussed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The Celtic languages Irish and Welsh have a morphological division between habitual and punctual verbal aspect. Both modern languages have also developed periphrastic progressive constructions consisting of the verb ‘BE’, a spatial preposition ‘at’ and a verbal noun, the Celtic equivalent to the infinitive in other languages, e.g.:

1. Modern Irish: Tá mé ag canadh.

Be.PRES. I at singing. VERBAL NOUN (VN).

2. Modern Welsh: Dw i yn canu.

Be.PRES. I at singing.VN.

‘I am singing.’

I addition periphrastic perfects have been created with the help of the verb ‘BE’, a preposition meaning ‘after’ and the verbal noun, e.g.:

3. Modern Irish: Tá mé tréis canadh.

Be.PRES I after singing.VN

4. Modern Welsh: Dw i wedi canu.

Be.PRES. I after singing.VN

‘I have sung’ [Lit.: I am after singing].

The grammaticalisation of spatial prepositions to tense and aspect markers is a well-known phenomenon (cf. e.g. Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994) and can also be observed in Irish and Welsh. Interestingly, both these languages seem to have grammaticalised progressive periphrasis at first, and then seem to have extended periphrasis towards expression of perfect aspect. Grammaticalisation of periphrastic prepositional constructions to mark future tense is most recent, and seemingly still going on.

The paper tracks the development of periphrastic progressives and perfects in Irish and Welsh. It is shown that periphrastic constructions evolved first in the progressive, derived from spatial constructions. At earlier stages of both languages, temporal adverbial phrases were used to modify main clause before they are found with the respective verbs ‘BE’. It will be argued that periphrastic perfects evolved secondarily, based on the model of progressive structures. This observation seems to hold for both Irish and Welsh, and it will be argued that the similarity in development of the two languages is due to drift as defined by Heine and Kuteva (2005).

Support verb constructions is one of the terms used to denote complex predicates, which contain a verb of general semantic content, like have, take, make give or do, and an object typically derived from a verb, as in He gives a talk every Monday evening.

Different functions have been described for these structures in English, including change of sentence structure and stress patterns, as well as creation of an obligatory object for transitive verb, have been attributed to them[1]. Their origin and development is still disputed and the possibility of influence of Celtic languages has been mooted repeatedly[2], lately e.g. by Klemola (2002)[3] and McWhorter (2006)[4].

Even though similar constructions also exist in the Irish language, no previous investigations have been carried out in this area.

The present paper proposes to address the research question when the use of do plus non-finite verbal forms developed in the Irish language, and how its usage compares to the documented evolution of the category in the history of English. The corpus based investigation of early Irish texts illustrates that, even though a number of similarities exist between the structures in these two languages, there are significant differences in their use in Irish and English.

This volume contains papers read at the eighth symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica held in Oslo on 6–7 May 2006. The papers deal with literary and linguistic aspects of Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Old Norse. Language papers examine matters such as preterite formations in Old Irish, the evolution of periphrastic perfect constructions in Irish, Irish place names, Old Norse loanwords in Scottish Gaelic and phonetic aspects of Scottish Gaelic dialects. Articles devoted to literature investigate references to Ireland in an Old Norse text, the representation of figures in Irish tradition such as Congal Cáech and Judas, the symbolism of blood in Irish tradition, aspects of the birth-tales of Cú Chulainn and include a re-examination of the work of the important Irish literary scholar James Carney. Papers dealing with the modern era include an overview of literature in Manx, a study of post-colonialism in Welsh and investigations of the portrayal of various groups and the use of personal names in a celebrated Irish novel. A further article looks at the visit of the well-known folklorist James Hamilton Delargy to Scandinavia in the 1920s.

This volume contains some of the papers read at the seventh symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica which was held at Uppsala on 21–22 May 2004. The twelve papers published here not only reflect the breadth of Celtic Studies but also the connections between the Celtic and Scandinavian traditions in general. One paper discusses the location of historical Lochlainn: was it Scotland or Scandinavia? The papers on language address topics in the areas of etymology and verbal morphology, topographical lexicon and onomastic formula, periphrastic verbal construction as well as a comparative corpus study of the use of the autonomous and passive progressive in Modern Irish. Literary articles deal with such topics as the shifting faces of the supernatural in Irish tradition, tripartitie structure in medieval Welsh narrative, aspects of the poet’s role in sixteenth-century Ireland as well as an article on an example of a dream-vision (aisling) parody from eighteenth-century Ireland. A final article discusses some documents of Irish interest from the Carl Wilhelm Von Sydow archive in Lund University.